mono kultur #01

September 2005
MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai: Inserting Silence
“To start seeing you have to eliminate
certain things.”
D € 3 / EU € 4
September 2005
MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai: Inserting Silence
“To start seeing you have to eliminate
certain things.”
D € 3 / EU € 4
2
MONO.KULTUR #01
In the rare realm of people who have mastered art and music as blended elements, Carsten
Nicolai continues to drive creative processes into new directions. Originally trained as a
landscape architect, Nicolai found his way via painting to a unique position on the borderline between art, science, and sound. By applying his own aesthetic vision to scientific and
sonic experiments, he has achieved to combine fundamentally different areas into a body
of work that remains unmistakeably his own.
A founder member of the acclaimed label raster-noton that also acts as an imprint for
the release of his own material under the alias alva noto, Nicolai has performed and created
installations in international exhibition spaces including the Guggenheim Museum in
New York, the Documenta X in 1997, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the 2001
Venice Biennale.
Recently, his disciplined perception of sound has been brought to the piano work of
Ryuichi Sakamoto for their collaborative records vrioon and insen which they will be
performing live throughout the next 12 months around the world. 2005 has also seen the
inception of the travelling installation syn chron, premiered at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a crystalline shaped architectural ‘skin’ in which acoustic and visual capabilities
are inbuilt. He also had his first retrospective anti.reflex at the Schirn Kunsthalle in
Frankfurt.
This interview begins in the empty factories of the former Karl Marx Stadt, whose
abandoned contents provided Nicolai with some critical starting points. A decade later,
we are witnessing the outcome of these inspirations in the works of an artist who is now
modulating the future.
Carsten Nicolai
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MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai
Photography: Bob Goedewaagen
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wellenwanne, 2000
Flat trays filled with water are arranged on four loud speakers that transmit varying and partly inaudible sound
compositions, thus creating correlating interference patterns on the water surface.
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MONO.KULTUR #01
I
In front of us we have two pieces of
paper. The first is a weaving pattern
for automated looms, an industry
that is connected to your birth place
of Chemnitz. The second is a screenshot from the desktop of your G4,
showing an open sound file of a track
from your forthcoming alva noto
record midway through composition.
I would like to connect the two.
Weaving Pattern, Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1989
Sound File Pattern, Carsten Nicolai, Berlin, 2004
They look similar on first view, but for me
there is quite a massive distance between
them in terms of time. I found these patterns in a factory, a fantastic factory where
they had been using the same technology
for the last seventy years. This was just after
the wall came down, and from one day to
the next all the workers never returned to
their workplace. You saw coffeespoons still
standing in the coffee. Then I realised I was
stepping on a floor of paper. When I looked
closer and opened the paper, I found these
patterns. So when I see these patterns I
think of the story behind them, these huge
factories in the middle of the city that
became empty. Then it was time for me
to start trying to ‘read’ these patterns. The
textile industry was the most important
industry for Chemnitz and gave the city
its identity, they grew together. When the
industry collapsed, Chemnitz started
shrinking. So there is a personal biography
in these patterns, even in the type of paper,
a paper which I later used for my drawings.
Carsten Nicolai
Sometimes you find things and you
cannot really say why you find them interesting, you just know they must be when
you start keeping them. I have four huge
metal boxes full of these patterns, all
collected from these factories. These here
are the smallest, some are much, much
larger. It was a functional design, but for
me, it was also an artistic work. They filled
out, by hand, different colours fields inside
a grid system, a grid that is everywhere in
these patterns and strange in that it does
not follow the regular metric system. This
is the first observation I would make – a
technological grid pattern. I found also that
it is such quality of work, that it was never
meant to be art and that it was never meant
to be displayed, and because of this, I think
they have a certain beauty. I still like the
aesthetics of them, the aesthetics of the
design that is an influence when we design
with raster-noton for example. It never
becomes ‘design’, it still has a beauty of
something that has a reason why it exists.
There is a functionality and I felt an affinity
to that.
As long as I kept them I was inspired
by them and I started to know more about
the background, the weaving machines and
how they started programming the patterns.
It was already a sort of programming even
before the existence of computers.
This brings us back to what I do now,
because at the moment I use algorithmic
structures, working with repetitive patterns
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and you realise how the patterns and these
techniques are related. Pattern is an important issue in my work. What is a pattern and
where does it come from? There is a polarity
between randomly organised patterns and
patterns that are more to do with logic or
algorithm. However, both patterns are connected to logic, they are not irregular.
When you are creating material for
record releases or preparing sound
for installative works, is the way in
which you are visually working on
the desktop an influence on how
you are making rhythmic structures?
There are several ways to work on this. One
is to work within the grid system. You work
with mathematics and mathematics is a
sort of religion, you believe in numbers.
When you believe in numbers, you believe
in the beauty of the row of numbers. You
discover a certain beauty exists if you use
a row of numbers like 1,2,5, or 1,3,4. And if
you start believing in this, you can work by
listening to the results. On the other hand
you may work visually.
Especially when I work with syncopated beats, which I am doing at the moment
and where I am layering a lot of rhythms on
top of each other, sometimes there are up to
three or four syncopated rhythms running
at the same time. With syncopated rhythms,
drop-outs happen that leave silence and
this is the most important part, because it
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creates a rhythm and not just chaos. You
can do this visually, because you know what
is the important silence point in the rhythm
loop and then you know that you will not
have a regular straight beat. You can design
this and then listen and say to yourself this
is working or this is not working. If it’s not
working, what I do is I delete as much out of
this ‘not working’ part until the remainder
works. It’s all about inserting silence.
Does that mean that you are
working with headphones off?
I use an editing program to make all the
rhythms, this means that I am not working
in realtime and I cannot listen to what I
have done immediately. I have to finish with
one panel before I know how it sounds and
to be able to start on the next. This means
that half of the work is listening and half
visual monitoring, but I have done this for
such a long time now that I know from sight
what the audio might sound like. It’s like
with written notes – a composer knows
from looking at them exactly how the score
will run.
II
Carsten Nicolai
Jungle gave way to Drum’n’Bass that
in turn gave way to 2 step and R’n’B.
In your transform release of 2001,
rhythmic breaking up of tones with
stabs of silence reminded us of fax
and modem dialling patterns meeting
with the 2 step dance rhythms born
out of clubs and pirate radio stations
in the U.S. and the U.K. How have
these different angles on rhythmmaking come to meet each other?
With transform I was following my own
sound aesthetic in terms of what sounds I
had selected, but as far as the patterns are
concerned, I really borrowed these from
the pop world. This is the reason I called the
record transform. To transform the stripped
down sound aesthetic with almost no melodies. Imagine you see a grid pattern of an
architectural drawing. There are no surfaces,
no patterns, no textures, you would just see
the structure of the track. I stripped down
the patterns that I was really interested in,
and learnt much through analysing R’n’B
and HipHop tracks, how they worked as
rows of numbers. I used this knowledge to
work further into new tracks and in a way I
am still working on the transform record.
It’s still transforming...
Yes, and now it’s getting more radical with
the sound aesthetic, not so clean, more distortion, more irritation, pushing syncopation
Photography: Bob Goedewaagen
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wellenwanne, 2000
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10 Hz
MONO.KULTUR #01
20 Hz
Carsten Nicolai
as far as possible. I was interested throughout the 1980’s in the rhythmic stuff, the funk
background. There was a certain point in
techno when the straight beat came back,
but I was always triggered off by beats where
the structure was not visible in the first
moments.
25 Hz
How is funk important in your music?
40 Hz
50 Hz
When you work with rhythmic stuff you are
conscious mainly of black music. Also in
recent years, I felt that black music has got
back to a high quality in terms of creating
rhythm again.
55 Hz
Do you think there is potential for
R’n’B producers to get in touch with
what is happening in the electronic
scene and vice versa?
95 Hz
100 Hz
110 Hz
milch, 2000
In this series, milk was exposed to sound frequencies between 10 and 150hz. It documents the ever changing
process of transformation of acoustic into visual phenomena.
Photography: Carsten Nicolai
80 Hz
Producers have become more important
now in the R’n’B field, stepping out of the
background. That we can refer to someone
like Timbaland and not the artists he produces, that we see him first and not Missy
Elliot shows us how the system is revealed.
However, these are pretty much two different worlds divided in terms of commercial
isation. Divided, I would say, to such an
extent that a mixing up of influences will
not happen.
The only person who has managed to
do this in the past is Björk and she did this
very positively by bringing electronic music
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into the foreground. Perhaps it is easier for
R’n’B artists to sample out of other artists,
something that has been happening for a
long time. The electronic music scene is
too small and too disconnected from this
very commercialised structure. It would be
fun to work with this field but at the same
time perhaps it would create a lot of misunderstandings. When I work on my material,
there are no release dates, no deadlines,
no tours, no pressure. It’s relaxed. There is
nothing that you can relate to how the commercial music business works. That I can
still develop things and they are recognised
on the outside is nice.
Is it a liberating state to be in control
of the patterns and rhythms of your
own output? You are distributing most
of your material through your label
raster-noton, a union of raster music
and your imprint noton which is now
in its sixth year.
With my own label, quick decisions are
possible. You can say, ‘In four weeks I want
to have a record out,’ and you do it. Then
perhaps it is not the way you want it, so you
can develop it further. With the packaging
and the pressing of the vinyls, if it is not
right, you can re-press or package until you
feel it is right to be released. That’s why
raster-noton has become famous. It takes
us a long time to release material. We really
try to get it right. This is one reason why we
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MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai
do not issue release dates. It is also totally
connected to ourselves and the small scale
of the label. Olaf Bender is running the
office and taking care of the fabrication and
I do the outside communication, it’s teamwork. It’s also connected to time. Sometimes
there is a lot of office-work to be done or
personal time to be respected. Then, when a
clearing comes, we say, ‘We’ll just do it,’ and
perhaps release three or four records at the
same time, which in terms of ‘strategy’ is
totally wrong, but we just do it. We also
never feel like this is material that has to
be put out this week, we have time. You can
listen to a lot of records that seem up to
date still, not getting old, timeless, we are
not in the food business.
III
There are now a total of three Clicks
& Cuts volumes on record shop
When labels like Mille Plateaux find terms
such as Clicks & Cuts, they have realised
there is a movement, or they wish to manifest
a movement by using this catchy framing.
It was never important for me, because it
is just a phrase, a marketing strategy. The
record sold well, that is the reason why three
Photography: Carsten Nicolai
shelves. Has this movement become
a prison for those who shaped this
way of making music? Are people, you
included, now looking for exit routes?
wolken, 2002
Physically, clouds consist of an accumulation of extremely fine drops of water or ice crystals. But they can
also be viewed as non-linear dynamic systems that resemble micro and macro structures.
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MONO.KULTUR #01
of them are in existence. Good marketing
strategy but artistically, these records
never had any relevance to me. When you
realise this from the outside, it is already
the point when people start orientating
differently, because you are already on a
peak. The people who were involved with
this theme at the beginning have already
found their way out.
The first ‚Clicks&Cuts‘ was probably
realeased just before this peak, the second ‚Clicks&Cuts‘ was after the peak
and the third ‚Clicks&Cuts‘ is not a real
‚Clicks&Cuts‘ record.
People such as..?
Such as the SND guys, who I really
respect. They are concentrating on other
things - going back to bringing out 12‘s,
curating the Lovebytes Digital Arts festival, working on solo experimental material. Other people started looking into pop,
working with singers. Andreas Tilliander for
example, collaborated with Jay Jay Johanssen. However SND took away rather than
added.
Frank Bretschneider, who also triggered the ‚Clicks&Cuts‘ movement took a
Carsten Nicolai
step back, concentrating on the sounds
that he grew up with. The last record he did
with Raster-Noton uses samples of languages..
There is a crossover, though, in the
way in which you are interested in
disturbance, interruption and erroring, or the way that things break
down within a process, and if someone is to define Clicks & Cuts it
is to do with the breaking down of a
system.
Which record is that ?
‚Gold‘. It is much more similiar to the
work that he did in the late 80‘s or early
90‘s.
I started collaborating with Ryoji
Ikeda and developed the cyclo. project,
then worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto, which
is really stepping out of a familiar area.
Ok, but I did not compile the records and I
was working on this theme anyway and am
still working on it, so nothing changed. Its
output changed, but I was never doing it for
Clicks & Cuts, so it was not relevant for
me.
So what did you feel was different
about your work in relation to the
other people who had been curated
in this movement?
IV
I never thought that I was doing music. I’m
not a musician. When you talk about composition, I can just accept this word because
I make a visual composition, but I never feel
myself as a musical composer, so I didn’t
know why these people wanted my music on
their compilation – because I thought my
stuff is so unmusical. When you listen to
the other tracks on the compilation and
then listen to my tracks, they are very low
volume because I am using very high and
very low tones. The mastering could not
treat this, so they just reduced the level of
the whole track. That is one aspect in which
my material does not really fit in to all this.
The use of error is important in your
approach to your work. You tell us in
your installation snow noise that
the formation of snowflakes begins
from impurities in the air.
I wrote a text on snowflakes before creating the installation published in an early
catalogue of mine titled infinity. I wrote
the text in 1996. It pre-empted my working
style, in fact it pre-empted everthing I was
to do. 1996 was also the year that I really
started destroying my work, decomposing
and fragmenting things. There is a philosopher, Marcello Viccini, who wrote about
fragmentation. This was one of the most
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important points for me, that each fragment
from a big unit, even if it is very tiny, still contains all the information of the big unit. We
see this now becoming true in terms of recent
research into DNA. The smallest part of our
cells has the information about our whole
body. This was the time that I made the
installation mikro makro and the record
with Mika Vainio.
I want to ask you about the long-term
future potential for basing creative
processes on erroring. Are there not
more utopian or optimistic phenomena to refer to as starting points?
For me, this question has within it another
question. This question is – do you believe
in the future, or to what extent can you
design the future? I cannot answer this
question. I might have a feeling of what
I might do, but there is no masterplan. Like
the weaving patterns we were discussing
earlier, I collected these patterns ten years
ago, but now work is appearing that looks
so similar. I didn’t know that was going
to happen, but I had a feeling about what
might come next. It follows a certain logic
and the logic comes from everyday life
and with each day it takes you closer to a
point. However, I let things go and this is
really important for me, that sometimes I
conclude things are not worth working on,
then later I realise they are worth working
on. I lose my concentration.
MONO.KULTUR #01
Like a conscious ‘drop out’?
Yes, but after a while I really work on them
to a point of completion. When I allow this
‘letting go’ it becomes clear what comes
back to me and what should or needs to
come back to me. Those are the most important ideas and the ones that must then be
worked on. That is something I have learned.
Returning to the question, however,
there is another text that has had a major
influence on me. It is a text about artificial
intelligence by Takashi Ikegami, entitled:
Self Mutation of Tape Loops, concerning loop structures.
Ikegami was talking about scientific
approaches to calculating systems, so he
used terms like ‘loop’, like ‘tape-loop’, like
‘white noise’. All these phrases: tape, loop,
noise, were very important for someone
like me who is working with music. For him
though, loop is a repetitive pattern and
noise is a mutation and mutation is error
and he was talking about all these different
things. But I could understand the direction
of the article because I understood the
same terms. The first time I went to Japan,
for my show ‚Paralell Lines Cross at Infinity‘
I went to find him and discovered he was
the same age as me, working scientifically
but with the thoughts like me of an artist,
following intuition. I invited him to speak at
one of the exhibition talks and there, he
questioned „what is the difference between
a scientific researcher and an artist?‘. I
answered that I felt there was not a big difference, however, at the end of the day, the
scientific researcher has write down their
research and present a paper and show that
they have been precise about his or her
investigations. This is very different to art.
As I was saying this, friends of Takashi in
the ausdience spoke up and said that
thought that there was no difference, and
that science relied alot on intuition.After
presenting this article, he has started to
work on languages, especially on behavioral
languages and mimicking. It is interesting
for me that he stopped this examination of
artificial intelligence and started to look
into social behaviour.
There was a time when a lot of emphasis and expectation was put on artificial
intelligence, that it would grow and become
a feature, but it never really featured as
quickly as people thought it would. It
becomes a general question: why are we
doing this? why do we think we always need
to go forward? What does ‘forward’ mean?
What happens ultimately, is that you rebuild
yourself constantly, in the most perfect way,
which would of course be very boring if we
consciously did it in isolation. Also, replication of ourselves in terms of machines.
Machines are still acceptable because they
are machines, but complex forms such as
cloning, this is when moral issues start to
arise. Attention was shifted, to open up and
question arguments as to what consciousness is? What is imagination? Heisenberg’s
Carsten Nicolai
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Photography: Lary 7
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realistic, 1998
Noise is a complex, randomly organised signal that cannot be expressed in any algorithm. In the installation
realistic, the noise contained in a gallery space is being recorded and layered in an endless loop.
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Carsten Nicolai
Theory of the Unsharp is involved here,
when a system is observed is it changed by
that observation? This brings us to deeper
questions such as Hegel posed: what is
actually material and what is imagined or
just part of our consciousness? I see myself
as a materialist person – I really believe
things are there.
Photography: Carsten Nicolai
V
realistic, 1998
You have mentioned previously a
physiological condition that you were
affected by when you were younger.
It was a condition that affected the
definition of your balance and to a
certain extent your eyesight. Has this
condition influenced your optical
works, such as the prototype telefunken paintings and the installation
visual rhythm, where themes of
light change, alterations in depth and
strobing come into play?
It’s strange when you wake up one morning
and from one second to the next you lose
your balance and you cannot stand up
anymore. You feel drunk, even though you
hadn’t been drinking. This went on for more
than a month. It was a very difficult period
for me, when I was suffering from a lot of
stress and at an emotional turning point in
a lot of ways. This was at a time, in Chemnitz, when I left my apartment and started
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living in my studio. For the first time in my
life I felt as if I had to find a fixed point,
because, physically, I was losing a fixed
point. Even now, it is unclear what triggered
it. It is not certain, but perhaps I still have it.
When one part of the brain suffers a
drop out, there is a compensation going on
to balance everything. Eventually correct
processes return and in the meantime there
is a calibration to achieve normality. A similar
calibration takes place when you are born.
You are born with an image of the world that
is flipped. The brain has to flip the image
again. The real image that we have on the
back of our eyes is opposite. Our brain is
constantly flipping that image. I began realising these things from that point of being
affected by this condition.
When I first started with music, with
high tones, I was not really aware of what
I was doing, but I discovered that we don’t
know what we can trigger with sound.
We know that we can trigger emotions with
sounds that we can hear, but when we go
out of this range, we don’t know anything
about it. It’s hard to treat this situation.
This was interesting both acoustically and
visually. Pieces like visual rhythm let
me bring people to this point, a point of
being aware that we trust in the visual. I
don’t want to talk about information, news
broadcasts and media so much, but, for
example, in medicine, picture media
become more important in relation to what
goes on in the body. With sound, we don’t
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listen into the body anymore, people now
want to see. Röntgen started with this and
then we progressed to ultrasound, MRT, and
visual analysis. It follows a very simple theory: what is visible, must exist. With visual
rhythm, we can challenge this way of thinking. In a gallery environment, when you look
at a painting being exhibited, you can say to
another person, ‘Did you see that painting?’
and the other person can say, ‘Yes, I saw the
painting.’ But with this installation, the work
as a whole does not function like that,
because the work is perceived differently
by everybody. It shifts the emphasis back
onto the viewer.
VI
The mediums and materials you now
work with include magnetic tape,
polyester aluminium, acrylic, rubber,
glass, and water. However, if we trace
your work back to its starting points
in the early nineties, you were working and living in the Chemnitz studio
using mediums such as oil paint, lithographs, and drawings. What shaped
the transition?
I never selected the materials consciously.
They were the materials that surrounded me.
The materials that were from the former
East now seem nostalgic.
Carsten Nicolai
Which materials for example?
The paper I was using for drawings and also
cardboard that I found in the empty factories. I was also mixing my own colours and
I was very interested in pigments. I really
wanted to know about materials and what I
was working with. If you look back on these
works now, you might say ‘he was selecting
these materials in a specific way’, but I wasn’t.
It was just what surrounded me. Sometimes
people confuse this use of materials with
what Beuys, for example, was using. However, Beuys was going specially to the East
to find these materials. As much as he might
have had a choice of paper from Italy, our
choice was really confined to what was directly around us. Someone from the Western
world might mix this up and think that there
was a selection, but there was no choice,
you don’t create an artificial environment.
You say that you were interested in
pigment, but your work now is monochromatic. You also replaced the
conventional stretched canvas with
polyester. It is a simplified appearance,
more restricted.
Colour is a very important issue for me, but
I have found that there are many colours
there in terms of light, a whole spectrum.
What I have always liked, is when, for example, you encounter a really sharp edge of a
dark colour field against a very bright colour
Photography: Uwe Walter
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visual rhythm, 2003
Horizontal and vertical line patterns create the optical illusion of a changing and vibrating
space, thus challenging the notion of the objectivity of a visual experience.
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Carsten Nicolai
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field. We find it really difficult to focus on
this with our eyes, because the contrast
level is so high. What happens is that a
corona forms and you experience ‘fades’
that don’t actually exist. What was interesting for me were these ‘fades’. I realised it
was all about frequency. When I am working
with sound I am interested in what you
cannot hear – the high and low, the ups and
downs. In the same way visually, I became
interested in brightness and what was out
of the scale. I tried to find these corners
and edges and the most sharp contrasts so
it becomes less about colour but more
about reflection and absorption. Black,
which we say is not a colour, absorbs and
white is the most reflective.
I took this further, with the use of canvases, changing to use polyester. Polyester
is translucent material, which for me was
important. When you look through it you are
modulating light, because it is a grid system.
When you look through a grid system you
are breaking light into colours of the rainbow, so you have all the colours. Therefore,
there is a mass of colour inside the work.
Photography: Saporetti
When did you choose to stop working
with canvas and to start playing with
this idea of translucence?
telefunken, 2000
The audio signal comprising various impulse frequencies is connected to the video input of a television which
translates the sound into corresponding horizontal line patterns.
It was a slow transition, over several years.
At the beginning, I was mounting paper over
frames, but I wanted to take it further, to ask –
what is a modern canvas today?
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A recognised canvas is a good frame with
linen stretched across it in a classical way.
However, how would you build one today?
Today, elements that are being developed
further are structures like aeroplanes, space
craft, probably also elements in warfare,
where high technology is employed. You
encounter materials here that are light and
flexible: aluminium, carbon fibres. I wondered why no one was using them. So I
searched for these materials and found
people who could make the frames for me.
magnetic static, 2004
The panels refer to the monitor images of the telefunken installation. With the black
lines created of audio tape, they represent a frozen acoustic signal.
Carsten Nicolai
VII
Photography: Uwe Walter
24
First visits to your installations,
paintings, and sculptures might lead
one to conclude that your agenda is a
minimalist one.
Take for instance the telefunken paintings,
which act as ‘screenshots’ of the relating
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installation. In isolation, these paintings
may seem like a minimalist work done in
the 60’s, just a composition of lines. For me
though, this is a sound, this composition, and
that is the reason why I view them as realistic. They are not as abstract as you think,
they have a function, they are still-shots of
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the sound. They carry the idea that the fragment contains the whole. It is minimalist,
but aims to open up another space. What I
am working towards is a level of perception
of things that we have no idea about. It’s
the same with the high frequencies. Firstly,
to start seeing, you have to eliminate certain
things, so first, I delete. This is really important for me, to delete what is unnecessary.
It is useful to me in terms of exhibition, to
take out what does not need to be there.
Secondly, I try to avoid this artistic handwriting that is so common in the art-world.
What do you mean when you say
‘artistic handwriting’?
I mean a language that you can easily
connect with an artist. What I am doing is
designing an environment and out of this
environment a piece grows by itself. One
of the best examples are the random-dot
paintings that people make themselves.
I am also using principles of physics, when
in wellenwanne, I work with interference
patterns in liquids, or the funken series
where I am photographing random formations of sparks. It’s really important for me
to bring these out of these conscious minimalist patterns. I have a problem with the
minimalist definition. ‘Minimalist’, ‘mini’, the
word is connected to smallness. For me,
the micro view is what is important. Making
things smaller, or making things less is
more about changing the perspective of a
space so it seems much, much smaller, but
has everything inside as well. I am not minimising the world, I am locating the world in
a much smaller area. For me, this is better
to control and I find it a much more convenient working method. It is difficult to be
in an expansive political environment or an
expansive social environment and to work
in this environment ‘truly’, because I don’t
know about all of this. However, if I make
a radius of 5cm on the top of my worktable,
then with this area I can say, ‘I know,’ but I
cannot draw a radius of 1km, and say,
‘I know this area.’ For me, they are the
same. It is not to say though, that there is
less world inside.
To paraphrase Gonzales Felix Torres,
he remarked that his art work was
the antithesis of minimalism, that he
believed in letting the shape of his
work be defined freely by the viewer.
The recent modular re-strukt
series where you invited visitors to
the gallery space to fill in modular
patterns with marker pens, suggests
that you are much more attracted
to principles of public interaction and
the elements of chance and change.
Has this been overlooked in previous
appreciation your work?
Well, it’s still a test for myself, because I
don’t like some of the results. For instance,
inside the modular re-strukt work, there
Carsten Nicolai
was a strange situation because people
were not following the rules of the installation. People just came and did their own
thing. So what do you do when someone is
not following your rule? It’s interesting. I
mean, I was relaxed at the beginning, seeing
what would come out of this. People didn’t
understand that it was a grid structure. If
you ignore this structure, then why not just
use a white piece of paper? Perhaps because it is in a gallery? There was a group
from the art school and they were using the
installation to display their creativity and
depart from their school system. This was
important for me to see, that when you have
rules, some people follow but others always
try to avoid these rules and create their
own ways. This was relevant in Japan, a
country whose culture is framed by strong
codes. Viewers of the random-dot paintings tried to split the stick on dots, or stick
them on other artworks! It makes you think,
too, what you would do, how you would
react. It’s a sort of feedback system.
Are you happy to have your work in
galleries?
Yes, I think so. At first, you see them as
commercial structures, but since we’ve
been running the label I see them very
differently. In Berlin especially, the galleries
play an important role because the institutions are not providing any ‘playgrounds’ for
younger artists. It’s special, too, because
27
here the economic pressure is not that
high, the young galleries are not scared to
experiment and therefore the work is not
always sellable. However, it’s also not so
bad if there is a work that someone can
take home! Its a way of distributing ideas.
What is nice is that you can be present in
someone else’s enviroment. I like this now,
but it took me a long time to understand it.
The CD and the vinyl record act in the
same way. When you listen, you are
also taken into someone else’s
environment ...
Yes and no. Artwork exists only one time. A
CD or an LP is a product that exists as many
times as people ask for it.
VIII
You have just talked about deleting
familiar languages. At present, you
are considering deleting the visual
stigma of the laptop as a musical
performance prop, and starting
instead to investigate the possibility
of triggering sounds via touch, in
preparation for performing your
vrioon material live, with Ryuichi
Sakamoto.
If you think about a grand piano and a laptop, they are quite similar in that you have
MONO.KULTUR #01
to unfold them. The problem with the laptop
is that when you unfold it, the back of the
screen faces the audience. You build a barrier. The grand piano works in absolutely the
opposite way. You unfold it, so the instrument is opened up from the side with the
player seen from the side as well. It’s easy
to see how the player is performing, also the
instrument itself is opened in a nice way, a
sort of ‘open source’. There is no barrier. The
most disturbing thing about playing with a
laptop is that it becomes a wall, mystifying
everything, which ultimately gives you the
effect that you are controlling everything.
You are not composing in realtime, this is
the biggest misconception with electronic
music. You have the material already prepared already. What i am trying to do is demystify what is going on behind the screen.
When am I composing? When
am I just running a playback engine? When
am I adjusting the visual? I want to try and
go back to show people how you are working, but also to show them that you are not
really working. I thought in the beginning
that I was solving this problem by using the
realtime visuals that are part of my live set,
because they are acting while the music is
playing. However, you are still facing them,
Carsten Nicolai
29
you are still lit up with this ‘magic backlight’.
I don’t like that. It is a pleasure to have a
personality on stage and I don’t want to
mystify this too much. I wish to open up the
laptop in a way that you have a multi-tasking situation, getting rid of the mouse and
the tracking pad and using three or four fin
gers at the same time, which is possible. To
research screens that are configuational
with everyone, the idea of fader boxes, that
everyone can design their own stencils to
be laid over the screen and use it as a fader
box. I envisage a light table device on which
are areas that may be touched to modulate
sounds.
What are your plans for the next four
to five years both in your work with
sound and your artwork?
To combine all ideas. I would love to have
one object in which all ideas come together,
visually, acoustically as well as in terms
of space and architecture. If you mean in
the very long term, then I would say the only
masterplan is ... to disappear.
Photography: Uwe Walter
28
syn chron, 2005
Sound and the corresponding laser projections are enhanced and amplified by the translucent skin of this architectural installation which acts as a large resonance body allowing for a physical audiovisual experience.
MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten
Carsten Nicolai
Nicolai
Photography: Uwe Walter
30
syn chron, 2005
3131
32
MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai: Inserting Silence
Interview by Andrew Cannon
Portrait by Kai von Rabenau
www.alvanoto.com
www.raster-noton.de
Publisher Kai von Rabenau
Editors Renko Heuer / Vivian Kea /
Katrin Kowark / Florian Rehn
Design Concept Laurent Benner /
Laurenz Brunner
Design Kai von Rabenau
Advertising Katrin Kowark
Press Vivian Kea
Artwork by Carsten Nicolai
Installation photography as credited,
Courtesy Galerie Eigen+Art Leipzig/Berlin
Corrections Daniel Clark
Printing Druckerei Frank Seltmann
Font Akkurat / www.lineto.com
Thank you for supporting us
Simon Baier / Volker Linus Baumann / Ole
Brömme / Nadja Dumouchel / Alexander
Eberle / Gabriele Fischer / Gila Kaplan /
Birte Kleemann and Sarah Miltenberger
at Galerie Eigen+Art Berlin / Martin
Kahrmann / Felix Koch / Lineto / Tato
Lopera / Magda Magiera / Tina Leckebusch /
Uli Meyer / Marcus Peichl / Boris Pofalla /
Pro Qm Berlin / Gerti von Rabenau / Carsten
Schwesig / Druckerei Seltmann / Florian
Sievers / Giuseppe Troiano / Fumie Tsuji /
Ann-Katrin Winklbauer
mono.kultur
Naunynstrasse 80
D – 10997 Berlin
+49.30.21809090
www.mono-kultur.com
redaktion@mono-kultur.com
VISDP Kai von Rabenau
The copyright remains with the author
and photographers.
mono.kultur is a new interview magazine
to appear monthly.
32
MONO.KULTUR #01
Carsten Nicolai: Inserting Silence
Interview by Andrew Cannon
Portrait by Kai von Rabenau
www.alvanoto.com
www.raster-noton.de
Publisher Kai von Rabenau
Editors Renko Heuer / Vivian Kea /
Katrin Kowark / Florian Rehn
Design Concept Laurent Benner /
Laurenz Brunner
Design Kai von Rabenau
Advertising Katrin Kowark
Press Vivian Kea
Artwork by Carsten Nicolai
Installation photography as credited,
Courtesy Galerie Eigen+Art Leipzig/Berlin
Corrections Daniel Clark
Printing Druckerei Frank Seltmann
Font Akkurat / www.lineto.com
Thank you for supporting us
Simon Baier / Volker Linus Baumann / Ole
Brömme / Nadja Dumouchel / Alexander
Eberle / Gabriele Fischer / Gila Kaplan /
Birte Kleemann and Sarah Miltenberger
at Galerie Eigen+Art Berlin / Martin
Kahrmann / Felix Koch / Lineto / Tato
Lopera / Magda Magiera / Tina Leckebusch /
Uli Meyer / Marcus Peichl / Boris Pofalla /
Pro Qm Berlin / Gerti von Rabenau / Carsten
Schwesig / Druckerei Seltmann / Florian
Sievers / Giuseppe Troiano / Fumie Tsuji /
Ann-Katrin Winklbauer
mono.kultur
Naunynstrasse 80
D – 10997 Berlin
+49.30.21809090
www.mono-kultur.com
redaktion@mono-kultur.com
VISDP Kai von Rabenau
The copyright remains with the author
and photographers.
mono.kultur is a new interview magazine
to appear monthly.